The Best Supporting Actress buzz for Penelope Cruz‘s Ferrari performance — the bitter, burning, marginalized-but-nonetheless-tough-as-nails wife of Enzo Ferrari, holding his fate and that of the car company itself in her hands — started roughly six weeks ago at the Venice Film Festival, and here I am adding a log to the fire.
Cruz and the bewigged and paunchy Adam Driver, who portrays the nearly 60-year-old Ferrari with a current of earnest conviction, perform a dining-room tabletop sex scene that out-points, I feel, the last historic milestone in this realm — the Jack Nicholson-Jessica Lange table-top in Bob Rafelson‘s The Postman Always Rings Twice (’81).
The difference is that the Cruz-Driver sex is joyful and eruptive and therapeutic while the Nicholson-Lange is merely hot and hungry.
Due respect to The Eyes of Tammy Fae‘s Jessica Chastain, but there’s no question that Cruz’s bravura performance in Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers (’21) should have won the Best Actress Oscar — everyone understands that. So the Ferrari nomination will likely result in Cruz being regarded as the front-runner — one of those “the Academy apologizes buut this will make things right” deals.
Today is the last day of Oscar voting. HE hereby pleads with all last-minute procrastinators to please open your hearts and cast your all-important votes for Penelope Cruz’s straight-up soul serving in Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers. Many wise and good people (LAFCA, Venice Film Festival jury, other significant critics groups) stand with you.
I like Jessica Chastain, I loved her in Zero Dark Thirty, and I certainly respect the herculean effort that went into the making and performing of The Eyes of Tammy Faye. But Best Actress cannot and should never be a Best Makeup thing…c’mon. It should be about strength, craft, pieces of a heart and the depth of a soul.
A few days ago Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling posted a chat with Parallel Mothers star and Best Actress contender Penelope Cruz. I meant to post it right away, but I let other stuff overwhelm and I failed to muster the discipline…my deepest apologies.
But this really has to be said and withoutequivocation to all Academy members: Penelope Cruz gave the deepest, richest, most emotionally fulfilling lead female performance of 2021…by far. Way, way above the realm of her illustrious competitors (Kidman, Gaga, Stewart, Chastain, Colman). You simply can’t watch Parallel Mothers and not come to this very conclusion. It’s not possible — not if you’re honest with yourself.
Remember that Penelope has already won 2021 Best Actress awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the San Diego Film Critics Society as well as the Venice Film Festival’s Best Actress award last September.
I’m going to stick this post to the top of Hollywood Elsewhere this weekend, and there’s nothing in it for me ad-wise. The Sony Classics team has been minimally responsive to my words of praise over the last two or three months. This is just me, my action…Penelope Cruz is the absolute soul mama of 2021 Best Actress contenders.
Durling: “This is the greatest performance by an actress of 2021 and that she needs to be nominated! Nomination voting is happening as we speak and we need to get Penelope among the five! Listen to her answer the last question (23:25) about working with Pedro Almodovar, on the last day of shooting…so heartfelt.”
After being under-valued, barely acknowledged and even ignored by too many film critics and pundits, Twitter forecasters, Joe Popcorn industry veterans, award-bestowing critics groups and award-season prognosticators (not to mention the less-than-prescient Critics Choice Association), Parellel Mothers‘ Penelope Cruz has been awarded LAFCA’s Best Actress trophy.
A reputable critics group has finally stood up for the finest female performance of 2021.
A little more than three months ago Cruz’s Parallel performance also won the Venice Film Festival’s Volpi Cup for Best Actress.
The Worst Person in the World‘s Renate Reinsve was voted the first Best Actress runner-up in the LAFCA voting.
LAFCA has given Drive My Car their Best Picture award.
3:35 pm: Otherwise the other LAFCA foodie winners fell into right line with the “living in a separate universe” aesthetic. The Best Picture winner hasn’t been announced as we speak but…
A handicapper friend assures me that Penelope Cruz, star of Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers — a film that is 15 times better than House of Gucci, 10 times better than Spencer and far more emotionally rewarding than Being The Ricardos — is almost certainly good for a Best Actress nomination.
I hope so. I would certainly think so. I realize Cruz might not win for reasons having nothing to do with quality of delivery. But she needs to be nominated, at least.
I’ve seen the Almodovar twice and I know Cruz’s performance is the shit this year. She’s the absolute queen of her category. No other lead female performance comes close to plucking the emotional chords that she owns the patent on. She’s given the best female performance of the year. Don’t debate it, no question, put it to bed.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has Penelope in 2nd place as we speak. Feinberg Frontrunners: Kristen Stewart (Spencer); Penélope Cruz (Parallel Mothers); Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos); Lady Gaga (House of Gucci) and Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter).
I realize that in the myopic and strangely calculating award-season culture that we live in that some people are insisting otherwise…that Penelope is in the rear somewhere. They’re saying that Nicole Kidman (Ricardos) or Kristen Stewart (Spencer) or Lady Gaga (Gucci) are somehow better or at least more likely to win, partly because they’re backed by some heavy-hitter agencies and expensive campaigns.
Which is why I suspect that the best Cruz can expect is a Best Actress nomination. Because Oscar races are not so much about merit as muscle and power and primal audience longings and identifications. If it were my call I would give Cruz the Oscar now but she at least needs to become one of the five…c’mon.
I know that Pedro’s film doesn’t open until 12.24 but the big critics groups will begin voting soon. Somehow or some way the award-season heat has to start building in Cruz’s favor. I hope she gets there — her performances ‘is obviously much better than Kidman’s, Gaga’s and KStew’s — but she might not make it. I can feel it — she’s just not in the conversation the way the others are.
Repeating: Cruz’s Parallel performance is somewhere between 5 and 10 and 15 times better than all the other performances put together. It’s one of the finest efforts of her career, and yet if you talk to certain people her name is barely in the conversation. (David Poland actually believes that Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim is one of the top three contenders.) As we speak Cruz is regarded as a peripheral player, and she’s not — she’s the top.
Six and a half weeks ago the 2022 Oscar nominations were announced, and to everyone’s surprise Parallel Mothers star Penelope Cruz, whom every handicapper had written off weeks earlier, landed a Best Actress nomination. And now, people are saying, she appears to be surging and may even win the Oscar come Sunday.
All the other award-season Yodas were either Doubting Thomases or cautious fence-sitters…damp-finger-to-the-wind equivocators. If you want to make it in this business you have to have heart.
Penélope Cruz:
-Didn’t get a Golden Globe nod
-Didn’t get a Critics Choice nod
-Didn’t get a SAG nod
-Didn’t even make the BAFTA *LONGLIST*
Tonight’s Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute (the Montecito Award) honored Penelope Cruz, whose Oscar-nominated performance in Parallel Mothers is easily and indisputably the best in her category.
Roger Durling‘s conversation with Cruz focused almost entirely on her 25-year history with Mothers director-writer Pedro Almodovar, which began with her performance in Live Flesh (’97). The chat was easy and comfortable — Durling really knows his Pedro-and-Penelope. But the award-presentation finale was amazing.
During the last lap Cruz had spoken of her lifelong admiration for Sophia Loren. Soon after director Eduardo Ponti (The Life Ahead) introduced a video of his mother, the 87 year-old Loren, who in turn introduced Cruz following words of heartfelt praise. The Loren video was a complete surprise to Cruz.
Not only was Penelope Cruz's Parallel Mothers performance ignored in the SAG nominations for Best Actress, but also by the BAFTA's longlist of Best Actress contenders.
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With her wins from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and (today) the National Society of Film Critics, Parallel Mothers‘ Penelope Cruz has now won two major-league Best Actress awards. Plus 13 out of 27 Gold Derby go-along whores have included her among their top-five spitball picks.
HE has never harbored the slightest doubt about the award-worthiness of Cruz’s performance. And yet Cruz isn’t among the six nominees for the Critics Choice Awards Best Actress award. They didn’t even nominate her! And yet it’s been claimed that the CCAs are predictive of the Oscars — sure!
HE also applauds the NSFC’s first-runner-up support of The Worst Person in the World‘s Renate Reinsve (42 votes); ditto handing its Best Supporting Actor trophy to Reinsve’s costar Anders Danielsen Lie (who’s also quite good in Bergman Island).
Otherwise the NSFC went hog-wild for Drive My Car — Best Picture, Best Director (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Best Actor (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Best Screenplay (Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe).
Drive My Car is a morose, slow-paced film about coping with grief and long-festering guilt (i.e., the trials and tribulations of grief monkeys). It’s strictly an art-house sauna movie for elite, ivory-tower critics — a respectable effort by any measure, but a movie that resides in its own cave and doesn’t begin to even try to capture or engage with or reflect anything about mainstream life in the years 2020 or ’21. It could have been made in 1957 or ’63 or ’86 or ’92.
NextBestPicture‘s Matt Neglia recently had the temerity to suggest that Drive My Car, having won Best Picture trophies from NSFC, LAFCA and the NYFCC, is cut from the same cloth as Goodfellas, Schindler’s List, L.A. Confidential, The Hurt Locker, The Social Network and Spotlight. Neglia is one of those film nerd types who lives on his own planet, or, if you will, inside his own rectum. There’s no reasoning with guys like this.